Continuations

Another announcement from last week that got strangely little attention was Amazon’s introduction of EC2 Reserved Instances. Now reserved instances in the cloud may sound like an oxymoron but it is simply guaranteed capacity. You pay an upfront fee for the guarantee that your instance will be availabl and then a lower ongoing usage fee. Amazon clearly has a ton of usage information on EC2 available that let’s them price this fairly aggressively. For instance paying a 1-year guarantee fee redu...

This has been a big week in cloud computing. Most importantly, Amazon removed the “Beta” label from EC2 and is now offering an SLA for EC2. This is essential for businesses that want to move core systems onto EC2. As I have stated before, though, EC2 is not really a cloud platform in and of itself, rather a highly advanced server provisioning infrastructure. Amazon also took several steps towards moving closer to a true cloud platform. In particular, they have added support for load balancing...